The Anatomy of Melancholy

The mind will be ready for capture when, happiest in its circumstances, It flourishes like a crop in fertile soil.

The mind is prone to lust, now hot, now cold, As grain grows lush in richer soil.

The place where we live makes a great difference, together with the climate, air and way of life, if they combine. In our Misnia, says Galen, near Pergamum, you will scarcely find an adulterer, but there are many at Rome because of the pleasures of the place.

It was that abundance of everything which made Corinth so infamous in antiquity, along with the city’s convenient position for receiving foreign visitors. Every day strangers entered through every gate from all directions. In that one temple of Venus, a thousand whores prostituted themselves, as Strabo writes, besides Lais and the others of greater fame. People of every nation flocked there as to a school of Venus.

The people of our hot southern countries are prone to lust, and far less sexually restrained than those who live in the north, as Bodin discusses at length in his Method of History, chapter 5. “Soft Asiatics”—so too Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, Italians, everyone at that latitude.

And within those regions, especially the places more fertile, abundant and delightful: Valencia in Spain; Capua in Italy, which Cicero calls “the home of luxury,” as Hannibal’s soldiers can testify; Canopus in Egypt; Sybaris, Phaeacia, Baiae, Cyprus and Lampsacus.

At Naples, the fruits of the soil and the pleasant air weaken their bodies and change their constitutions, so much so that Florus calls it “a contest between Bacchus and Venus”; but Foliot admires it.

In Italy and Spain they have brothels in every large city, as in Rome, Venice and Florence, where, some say, ninety thousand people live, ten thousand of them courtesans. Yet despite all this, almost every gentleman has a mistress of his own. Nowhere are fornication and adultery so common: “The whole city has now become a brothel.” How could a man live chastely amid so many temptations?

Now if youthful vigour, high rank—by which I mean freedom—and the immunity from punishment that great people claim for such sins all come together, what an opening this must make for every kind of vice! With what fury it will rage! For, as Maximus of Tyre, the Platonist, observes, “when lust has acquired corrupt material to work upon, headlong licence and unbridled boldness,” and so forth, what will it not accomplish in such people?

Princes and great men commonly have no scruples at all about such things. Like that whore in Spartian—“Whatever I please is permitted”—they think they may do as they like, admit it publicly, and boast, like Proculus, who wrote to a friend in Rome about his famous exploits of this kind, instead of feeling any shame.